Tootfinder

State, local officials seek to ban ICE agents' masks (Russell Contreras/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/07/19/states-cities-bans-ice-agents-masks-id
http://www.memeorandum.com/250719/p15#a250719p15

As unrest and military troops overtake Los Angeles, terrifying scenes are also unfolding in smaller communities around the country.
They, too, are being invaded by what resembles a secret police force, often indistinguishable from random thugs.
https://www.washington…

The secret police descending on Small Town, U.S.A.
Masked immigration officials are storming towns and arresting people.

FocalClick-XL: Towards Unified and High-quality Interactive Segmentation
Xi Chen, Hengshuang Zhao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14686 https://

FocalClick-XL: Towards Unified and High-quality Interactive Segmentation
Interactive segmentation enables users to extract binary masks of target objects through simple interactions such as clicks, scribbles, and boxes. However, existing methods often support only limited interaction forms and struggle to capture fine details. In this paper, we revisit the classical coarse-to-fine design of FocalClick and introduce significant extensions. Inspired by its multi-stage strategy, we propose a novel pipeline, FocalClick-XL, to address these challenges simultaneously. Fol…

Vance Boelter has shown us the true face of the R-party: murderous, violent, gun-addicted, rampaging, and deceptive.
His act of disguising himself as a police officer in order to deceive his victims makes it beyond necessary for police and other law enforcement to have clear, readable, and accurate identity tags, front and back, that can be read at a distance. And such officers must not hide their identity by wearing face covering masks.
It is critical to both know that a law en…

AutoPartGen: Autogressive 3D Part Generation and Discovery
Minghao Chen, Jianyuan Wang, Roman Shapovalov, Tom Monnier, Hyunyoung Jung, Dilin Wang, Rakesh Ranjan, Iro Laina, Andrea Vedaldi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13346

AutoPartGen: Autogressive 3D Part Generation and Discovery
We introduce AutoPartGen, a model that generates objects composed of 3D parts in an autoregressive manner. This model can take as input an image of an object, 2D masks of the object's parts, or an existing 3D object, and generate a corresponding compositional 3D reconstruction. Our approach builds upon 3DShape2VecSet, a recent latent 3D representation with powerful geometric expressiveness. We observe that this latent space exhibits strong compositional properties, making it particularly well-s…

They appeared in plain clothes outside a San Diego hotel,
wore camouflage as they raided a Los Angeles factory 
and arrived with military gear at a Ventura County farm.
The presence of thousands of hard-to-identify federal agents is a new fact of life in Southern California this summer-- as the Trump administration carries out the president’s promised deportations.
Many residents may assume these masked agents are officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE…

Behind the masks: Who are the people rounding up immigrants in California?
The presence of masked federal agents is an unnerving part of life in Southern California this summer. Here’s a look at who’s carrying out the immigration raids.

Opinion | The secret immigration police descending on Small Town, U.S.A. - The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/06/11/immigration-arrests-ice-raid-masks/

Genndy Tartakovsky's developing a new show 'Heist Safari' that looks pretty great. Loved what he did with Dexter's Lab. This one's about three estranged frog brothers who meet up at their dad's funeral, have to rob a bank to inherit their late dad's fortune, and have issues when they cut side deals with mobsters. Every episode will be executed as just one shot, the events won't be in chronological order, and it'll have an EDM score. Looks & sounds prom…

Genndy Tartakovsky Developing 'Heist Safari' Animated Series for Adult Swim
Celebrated animator Genndy Tartakovsky — the tooned-up brain behind the adult-comedy movie Fixed (coming to Netflix on August 13), Sony's Hotel Transylvania

Accessibility Barriers in Multi-Terabyte Public Datasets: The Gap Between Promise and Practice
Marc Bara
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13256 https://

Accessibility Barriers in Multi-Terabyte Public Datasets: The Gap Between Promise and Practice
The promise of "free and open" multi-terabyte datasets often collides with harsh realities. While these datasets may be technically accessible, practical barriers -- from processing complexity to hidden costs -- create a system that primarily serves well-funded institutions. This study examines accessibility challenges across web crawls, satellite imagery, scientific data, and collaborative projects, revealing a consistent two-tier system where theoretical openness masks practical exclusivity. …

"…the long arc of history has never been kind to those who rule by force rather than persuasion."
https://www.meidasplus.com/p/court-victory-masks-political-freefall

Court Victory Masks Political Freefall
As the President basks in Supreme Court victories and executive power grabs, his core supporters are peeling away—and the consequences may be deeper than he thinks.

FBI busts alleged LA riot leader who was filmed helping to distribute 'Bionic Shield' face masks to protesters (Jennie Taer/New York Post)
https://nypost.com/2025/06/12/us-news/fbi-busts-alleged-la-riot-leader-who-was-filmed-handing-out-bionic-shield-face-masks-to-protesters/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250612/p118#a250612p118

masks at protests / demographics
Interestingly, at the May Day gathering I was the only one in a mask.
Thinking about the contrast with the trans protest the other week, where "good" (fitted not floppy) masks were dotted about throughout the crowd, and felt normalised.
Today's march was a less crowded event than the trans protest, so pretty low-risk for covid transmission anyway. But then when we got to the mini-fair after the march, indoors at the Friends' Meeting House, I didn't see anyone masking indoors either.
I wonder about the demographics of that difference. Seems like there's a traditional union/Labour left who share the mainstream denial of present-day covid, and a statistically more disabled & marginalised cohort where trans awareness and disability/illness awareness overlap.
#masks #CovidIsntOver

Adapting Whisper for Streaming Speech Recognition via Two-Pass Decoding
Haoran Zhou, Xingchen Song, Brendan Fahy, Qiaochu Song, Binbin Zhang, Zhendong Peng, Anshul Wadhawan, Denglin Jiang, Apurv Verma, Vinay Ramesh, Srivas Prasad, Michele M. Franceschini
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12154 …

Adapting Whisper for Streaming Speech Recognition via Two-Pass Decoding
OpenAI Whisper is a family of robust Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models trained on 680,000 hours of audio. However, its encoder-decoder architecture, trained with a sequence-to-sequence objective, lacks native support for streaming ASR. In this paper, we fine-tune Whisper for streaming ASR using the WeNet toolkit by adopting a Unified Two-pass (U2) structure. We introduce an additional Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) decoder trained with causal attention masks to generate str…

PA appears to be on fire, and that smoke is up here in NYC. AQI is in the 70s-80s, so wear masks out there folks!

Reminder: public protest is about visibility, not hiding. The power comes from people being willing to be visible, put their time on the line, and if needed, their bodies.
If you're going to start shit, maybe just ... don't. Direct action of the illegal sort requires careful planning and a tactical and strategic plan for why it will win. It happens sometimes, but it's not the mode, it's not the mode of the No Kings protests. This is a popular, public demonstration of outrage. It's legal (for now, and I hope, ever).
Yes, the police may try to kettle protesters and then trap them into curfew violations in places that have curfews. Masks won't save us from that where it happens. Just running the system with competent representation (and enough bodies to make it A Problem for the system) will.
We don't all need to be masked vigilantes at protests, and in a lot of cases, we need to be worried about the people masking up and starting shit. Remember that this is our opponents current tactic: masked, violent attacks. Don't look like them.

ICE Lawyers Are Hiding Their Names in Immigration Court #fascism

ICE Lawyers Are Hiding Their Names in Immigration Court
ICE attorneys fighting to deport immigrants are able to obscure their identities — no masks required.

Investigating Vulnerabilities and Defenses Against Audio-Visual Attacks: A Comprehensive Survey Emphasizing Multimodal Models
Jinming Wen, Xinyi Wu, Shuai Zhao, Yanhao Jia, Yuwen Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11521

Investigating Vulnerabilities and Defenses Against Audio-Visual Attacks: A Comprehensive Survey Emphasizing Multimodal Models
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs), which bridge the gap between audio-visual and natural language processing, achieve state-of-the-art performance on several audio-visual tasks. Despite the superior performance of MLLMs, the scarcity of high-quality audio-visual training data and computational resources necessitates the utilization of third-party data and open-source MLLMs, a trend that is increasingly observed in contemporary research. This prosperity masks significant security risks. E…

The United States Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California, has filed a criminal complaint against
#Alejandro #Orellana,
a local immigration activist in Los Angeles.
They’ve charged him for distributing face masks to protestors.
They specify that the masks are supposed to prot…

Only Criminals Don’t Want To Be Gassed By The Government
The Tellingly Pathetic Case Against Alejandro Orellana

TD-TOG Dataset: Benchmarking Zero-Shot and One-Shot Task-Oriented Grasping for Object Generalization
Valerija Holomjova, Jamie Grech, Dewei Yi, Bruno Yun, Andrew Starkey, Pascal Mei{\ss}ner
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05576

TD-TOG Dataset: Benchmarking Zero-Shot and One-Shot Task-Oriented Grasping for Object Generalization
Task-oriented grasping (TOG) is an essential preliminary step for robotic task execution, which involves predicting grasps on regions of target objects that facilitate intended tasks. Existing literature reveals there is a limited availability of TOG datasets for training and benchmarking despite large demand, which are often synthetic or have artifacts in mask annotations that hinder model performance. Moreover, TOG solutions often require affordance masks, grasps, and object masks for trainin…

masks at protests / demographics 2/n
I wonder about the influence of employment, as well. If you're at risk every work day, I could well imagine it seeming pointless to start being careful the rest of the time, and maybe just too cognitively dissonant to consider.
I remember in 2020, someone I knew was working at Waterstones, and they were forbidden to mask up at work - even though 2020 was before the whole "covid is over" thing.
I also remember reading about someone - maybe a nurse? that _kind_ of job, anyway - who'd started wearing a fitted mask while the default in their workplace was baggy blues, and iirc was formally rebuked. It wasn't allowed.
If for whatever reason you're unable to hold down a typical job, you might not have much cash for _getting_ things like masks, but you're also not under that same kind of economic pressure to put yourself at risk.
#masks #work #CovidIsntOver

Learning Segmentation from Radiology Reports
Pedro R. A. S. Bassi, Wenxuan Li, Jieneng Chen, Zheren Zhu, Tianyu Lin, Sergio Decherchi, Andrea Cavalli, Kang Wang, Yang Yang, Alan L. Yuille, Zongwei Zhou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05582

Learning Segmentation from Radiology Reports
Tumor segmentation in CT scans is key for diagnosis, surgery, and prognosis, yet segmentation masks are scarce because their creation requires time and expertise. Public abdominal CT datasets have from dozens to a couple thousand tumor masks, but hospitals have hundreds of thousands of tumor CTs with radiology reports. Thus, leveraging reports to improve segmentation is key for scaling. In this paper, we propose a report-supervision loss (R-Super) that converts radiology reports into voxel-wise…

ICE Agents Concealing Their Faces: Can They Really Do That? – Mother Jones
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/06/ice-immigration-agents-masks-masking-concealing-faces-legal/

Pointing to protesters, but not ICE agents, Trump demands arrests of those in masks (Steve Benen/MSNBC)
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/pointing-protesters-not-ice-agents-trump-demands-arrests-masks-rcna211787
http://www.memeorandum.com/250609/p60#a250609p60

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.21301 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@ar…

Low-loss silicon nitride Kerr-microresonators fabricated with metallic etch masks via metal lift-off
Stoichiometric silicon nitride has emerged as a widely used integrated photonic material owing to its high index of refraction, nonlinear optical properties, and broad transparency window spanning visible to mid-IR frequencies. However, silicon nitride is generally more resistant to reactive ion etching than are typical etch masks made of polymer-based resist. This necessitates resist layers that are significantly thicker than the silicon nitride and results in mask patterns which are tall and …

Just for terminological issues: what are the exact requirements to call a situation “civil war”?
The area around LA river in Paramount is literally burning, federal agents and sheriff's deputies in full gear with gas masks, vans running over people…
#FederalActivities

There was an older lady in the train sitting across from us who was literally opening up a bottle of cough syrup and chugging it. We were wearing masks, she was not.
Perfect timing for our visit: https://aus.social/@DenisCOVIDinfoguy/114628380231359490

Denis - The COVID info guy - (@DenisCOVIDinfoguy@aus.social)
Attached: 1 image 🇬🇧 UK: Doctors call for return of face masks after new COVID strain reaches UK. In the UK, cases of the new COVID variant NB.1.8.1 have been reported. WHO is monitoring due to its rapid spread and possible resistance to prior infection or vaccination. Source: https://archive.md/DTVHw @auscovid19@a.gup.pe

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/mit-student-prints-ai-polymer-masks-to-restore-paintings-in-hours/

When DJ Cummerbund made this mashup in 2020 I did take notice that one of the acts was "BTS Skytrain" but I just assumed this was just some strange relative of Korea's BTS.
Shame on me for not knowing or at least spotting that it was an actual promotional video for Bangkok's mass transit system - which also means I was not able to tell the difference between Thai and Korean people.
My only defence is that they are wearing masks but still…

Bill would force ICE agents to ID themselves, ban most masks (Russell Contreras/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/07/08/ice-agents-masks-democrats-id-bill
http://www.memeorandum.com/250708/p49#a250708p49

Advancing Medical Image Segmentation via Self-supervised Instance-adaptive Prototype Learning
Guoyan Liang, Qin Zhou, Jingyuan Chen, Zhe Wang, Chang Yao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07602

Advancing Medical Image Segmentation via Self-supervised Instance-adaptive Prototype Learning
Medical Image Segmentation (MIS) plays a crucial role in medical therapy planning and robot navigation. Prototype learning methods in MIS focus on generating segmentation masks through pixel-to-prototype comparison. However, current approaches often overlook sample diversity by using a fixed prototype per semantic class and neglect intra-class variation within each input. In this paper, we propose to generate instance-adaptive prototypes for MIS, which integrates a common prototype proposal (CP…

GOP is suddenly cool with masks—at least for ICE agents
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/6/6/2326366/-GOP-is-suddenly-cool-with-masks-at-least-for-ICE-agents

Some wear balaclavas. Some wearneck gators, sunglasses and hats. Some wear masks and casual clothes.
Across the country, armed federal immigration officers have increasingly hidden their identities while carrying out immigration raids, arresting protesters and roughing upprominent Democratic critics.
It’s a trend that has sparked alarm among civil rights and law enforcement experts alike.
Mike German, a former FBIagent, said officers’ widespread use of masks was unprecedent…

Integrated Galaxy Light from Stacking $10^5$ Random Pointings in the Dark Energy Survey Data
Jenna E. Moore, Seth H. Cohen, Philip Mauskopf, Evan Scannapieco
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08162

Integrated Galaxy Light from Stacking $10^5$ Random Pointings in the Dark Energy Survey Data
We present a new technique for measuring the integrated galaxy light (IGL) with stacked image data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES). We extract $1\times1$ arcminute cutouts from nearly 100,000 randomly selected positions in the g, r, i, z, and Y bands from the DES data release 2 (DR2) maps. We generate source catalogs and masks for each cutout and the images are subsequently stacked to generate deep images of the sky both with and without sources. The IGL is then calculated by taking the diffe…

The secret police descending on Small Town, U.S.A. (Catherine Rampell/Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/06/11/immigration-arrests-ice-raid-masks/?pwapi_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJyZWFzb24iOiJnaWZ0IiwibmJmIjoxNzQ5NjE0NDAwLCJpc3MiOiJzdWJzY3JpcHRpb25zIiwiZXhwIjoxNzUwOTk2Nzk5LCJpYXQiOjE3NDk2MTQ0MDAsImp0aSI6ImIzYzNkZmY2LTM3OGUtNDE2OS05MzdjLTVlNWQwOTUyNGU5NyIsInVybCI6Imh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lndhc2hpbmd0b25wb3N0LmNvbS9vcGluaW9ucy8yMDI1LzA2LzExL2ltbWlncmF0aW9uLWFycmVzdHMtaWNlLXJhaWQtbWFza3MvIn0.Y_FWR99bU09JQCwbWczWWN_YEnrAegE-dLLpuSmilqM&itid=gfta
http://www.memeorandum.com/250611/p86#a250611p86

Cryptocurrencies are tools for criminals and they know that. They do not, however, seem to understand the limitations:
https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/05/fractured-skulls-and-ski-masks-more-crypto-kidnap-madnes…

#JensSpahn again, the good German and christ wing guy who sold our masks during #Covid to the Nazi right wing bullshit (he's a landlord too btw). So much for the upper class in the FRG.

Congresswoman Nydia Velšzquez on Saturday held a rally outside a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in New York City to promote her recently introduced "No Masks for ICE Act".
“We would never accept it if the NYPD operated in masks without names or badges
— and we shouldn’t accept it from ICE either,”
Velšzquez (D-N.Y.) said in a statement, referring to the New York Police Department.
“When agents hide their faces and identities they creat…

Velázquez Leads 'No Masks for ICE Act' Rally at NYC Field Office | Common Dreams
"When agents hide their faces and identities they create chaos, fear, and open the door to abuse. Immigrant communities are left wondering if they're being arrested or kidnapped."

Um, CNN, the whole "secret" part of secret police is that they wear masks and operate outside of the law. There's no "but" there - they are secret police. Warrantless, going outside the purview of their mission by disappearing US citizens, and so on, it's pretty clear what they are. #FuckICE
Imagine being naive enough to write "apparently to protect age…

southpaw (@nycsouthpaw.bsky.social)
This is not an apt moment to use the word "but." https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/09/politics/ice-cbp-police-los-angeles-immigration

Physics-informed neural networks and neural operators for a study of EUV electromagnetic wave diffraction from a lithography mask
Vasiliy A. Es'kin, Egor V. Ivanov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04153

Physics-informed neural networks and neural operators for a study of EUV electromagnetic wave diffraction from a lithography mask
Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) and neural operators (NOs) for solving the problem of diffraction of Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) electromagnetic waves from a mask are presented. A novel hybrid Waveguide Neural Operator (WGNO) is introduced, which is based on a waveguide method with its most computationally expensive part replaced by a neural network. Numerical experiments on realistic 2D and 3D masks show that the WGNO achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and inference time, providing a hi…

Electrically reconfigurable extended lasing state in an organic liquid-crystal microcavity
Dmitriy Dovzhenko (School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom), Luciano Siliano Ricco (Science Institute, University of Iceland, Reykjavik, Iceland), Krzysztof Sawicki (School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom), Marcin Muszy\'nski (Institute of Experimental Physics, Faculty of Physics, University of Wa…

Electrically reconfigurable extended lasing state in an organic liquid-crystal microcavity
Small-footprint, low-power arrays of coupled coherent emitters with the capability of near- and far-field engineering and coherence control are highly sought after to meet modern nanophotonics evolving needs. Between existing solutions based on vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers, phase masks in bulk traditional cavity-based systems, and lattices of exciton-polariton condensates, only the strongly light-matter coupled systems were shown to be capable of controlled on-chip interaction betwee…

3D PixBrush: Image-Guided Local Texture Synthesis
Dale Decatur, Itai Lang, Kfir Aberman, Rana Hanocka
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.03731 https://

3D PixBrush: Image-Guided Local Texture Synthesis
We present 3D PixBrush, a method for performing image-driven edits of local regions on 3D meshes. 3D PixBrush predicts a localization mask and a synthesized texture that faithfully portray the object in the reference image. Our predicted localizations are both globally coherent and locally precise. Globally - our method contextualizes the object in the reference image and automatically positions it onto the input mesh. Locally - our method produces masks that conform to the geometry of the refe…

Ex-FBI agent on ICE masking:
“Masking has always been associated with police states.
I think the masking symbolizes the drift of law enforcement away from democratic controls.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/j

TumorGen: Boundary-Aware Tumor-Mask Synthesis with Rectified Flow Matching
Shengyuan Liu, Wenting Chen, Boyun Zheng, Wentao Pan, Xiang Li, Yixuan Yuan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24687

TumorGen: Boundary-Aware Tumor-Mask Synthesis with Rectified Flow Matching
Tumor data synthesis offers a promising solution to the shortage of annotated medical datasets. However, current approaches either limit tumor diversity by using predefined masks or employ computationally expensive two-stage processes with multiple denoising steps, causing computational inefficiency. Additionally, these methods typically rely on binary masks that fail to capture the gradual transitions characteristic of tumor boundaries. We present TumorGen, a novel Boundary-Aware Tumor-Mask Sy…

Democrats push bill that would ban face masks for ICE agents and force them to ID themselves | The Independent
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/democrats-immigration-law-enforcement-identification-b2784771.html

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.16652 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCV_…

Seeing Far and Clearly: Mitigating Hallucinations in MLLMs with Attention Causal Decoding
Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have significantly improved performance in visual question answering. However, they often suffer from hallucinations. In this work, hallucinations are categorized into two main types: initial hallucinations and snowball hallucinations. We argue that adequate contextual information can be extracted directly from the token interaction process. Inspired by causal inference in the decoding strategy, we propose to leverage causal masks …

Someone's gonna commit First Degree Glitter with Intent to Sparkle.
#USpol #ice #glitter

What is and isn't legal when ICE officers make an immigration arrest (Arelis R. Hernšndez/Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/07/02/ice-raids-arrests-masks-warrants-kids/?pwapi_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJyZWFzb24iOiJnaWZ0IiwibmJmIjoxNzUxNDI4ODAwLCJpc3MiOiJzdWJzY3JpcHRpb25zIiwiZXhwIjoxNzUyODExMTk5LCJpYXQiOjE3NTE0Mjg4MDAsImp0aSI6ImU1NmZlMjFiLWI1OWQtNDFlOC1iMzQxLTA4MzFiYmQ1ZTk5NCIsInVybCI6Imh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lndhc2hpbmd0b25wb3N0LmNvbS9pbW1pZ3JhdGlvbi8yMDI1LzA3LzAyL2ljZS1yYWlkcy1hcnJlc3RzLW1hc2tzLXdhcnJhbnRzLWtpZHMvIn0.Kh9fZ43UMlhmugo1z9eJs9cIj27qLYFQ4R2_G2mUI7M&itid=gfta
http://www.memeorandum.com/250702/p69#a250702p69

Adaptive Differential Denoising for Respiratory Sounds Classification
Gaoyang Dong, Zhicheng Zhang, Ping Sun, Minghui Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02505

Adaptive Differential Denoising for Respiratory Sounds Classification
Automated respiratory sound classification faces practical challenges from background noise and insufficient denoising in existing systems. We propose Adaptive Differential Denoising network, that integrates noise suppression and pathological feature preservation via three innovations: 1) Adaptive Frequency Filter with learnable spectral masks and soft shrink to eliminate noise while retaining diagnostic high-frequency components; 2) A Differential Denoise Layer using differential attenti…

Beyond Simple Edits: X-Planner for Complex Instruction-Based Image Editing
Chun-Hsiao Yeh, Yilin Wang, Nanxuan Zhao, Richard Zhang, Yuheng Li, Yi Ma, Krishna Kumar Singh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05259

Beyond Simple Edits: X-Planner for Complex Instruction-Based Image Editing
Recent diffusion-based image editing methods have significantly advanced text-guided tasks but often struggle to interpret complex, indirect instructions. Moreover, current models frequently suffer from poor identity preservation, unintended edits, or rely heavily on manual masks. To address these challenges, we introduce X-Planner, a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM)-based planning system that effectively bridges user intent with editing model capabilities. X-Planner employs chain-of-thou…

California SB 627 amended, passed.
Making a Misdemeanor:
⭐️ANY Law Enforcement officer, state or federal,
“shall not wear any mask or personal disguise while interacting with the public” (N95 ok)
⭐️“require (LE) officers to include their name or badge number on their uniforms”

Prez #Drumpf & #Hegseth say #Feds to deploy troops including #Marines to Los Angeles after continuous weekend

June 7, 2025: Donald Trump presidency news
President Donald Trump is deploying 2,000 National Guardsmen to Los Angeles in response to protests over immigration enforcement activities there.

Simplified Aluminum Nitride Processing for Low-Loss Integrated Photonics and Nonlinear Optics
Haochen Yan, Shuangyou Zhang, Arghadeep Pal, Alekhya Gosh, Abdullah Alabbadi, Masoud Kheyri, Toby Bi, Yaojing Zhang, Irina Harder, Olga Lohse, Florentina Gannott, Alexander Gumann, Eduard Butzen, Katrin Ludwig, Pascal DelHaye
https://ar…

Simplified Aluminum Nitride Processing for Low-Loss Integrated Photonics and Nonlinear Optics
Aluminum nitride (AlN) is an extremely promising material for integrated photonics because of the combination of strong \c{hi}2 and \c{hi}3 nonlinearities. However, the intrinsic hardness of the material and charging effects during electron beam lithography make AlN nanofabrication a challenging process. Conventional approaches often require multiple hard masks and a metal mask to fabricate nanostructures. In this letter, we report a novel, simple method to fabricate AlN microresonators by usin…

Learning Individual Reproductive Behavior from Aggregate Fertility Rates via Neural Posterior Estimation
Daniel Ciganda, Ignacio Camp\'on, I\~naki Permanyer, Jakob H Macke
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22607

Learning Individual Reproductive Behavior from Aggregate Fertility Rates via Neural Posterior Estimation
While age-specific fertility rates (ASFRs) provide the most extensive record of reproductive change, their aggregate nature masks the underlying behavioral mechanisms that ultimately drive fertility trends. To recover these mechanisms, we develop a likelihood-free Bayesian framework that couples an individual-level model of the reproductive process with Sequential Neural Posterior Estimation (SNPE). This allows us to infer eight behavioral and biological parameters from just two aggregate serie…

EditP23: 3D Editing via Propagation of Image Prompts to Multi-View
Roi Bar-On, Dana Cohen-Bar, Daniel Cohen-Or
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20652 https://

EditP23: 3D Editing via Propagation of Image Prompts to Multi-View
We present EditP23, a method for mask-free 3D editing that propagates 2D image edits to multi-view representations in a 3D-consistent manner. In contrast to traditional approaches that rely on text-based prompting or explicit spatial masks, EditP23 enables intuitive edits by conditioning on a pair of images: an original view and its user-edited counterpart. These image prompts are used to guide an edit-aware flow in the latent space of a pre-trained multi-view diffusion model, allowing the edit…

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on BBCRadio3's #SoundOfCinema
Alejandro Jodorowsky & The Jazz Composer’s Orchestra:
🎵 Holy Mountain "Mattresses, Masks & Pearls"
#AlejandroJodorowsky #TheJazzComposersOrchestra

Avoiding gang territory so as to not run into actual criminals, wearing masks, no warrants, and:
ICE Tells Agents They Can Start Making Unjustified Arrests Again | Techdirt
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/06/20/ice-tells-agents-they-can-start-making-unjustified-arrests-again/

HalluSegBench: Counterfactual Visual Reasoning for Segmentation Hallucination Evaluation
Xinzhuo Li, Adheesh Juvekar, Xingyou Liu, Muntasir Wahed, Kiet A. Nguyen, Ismini Lourentzou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21546

HalluSegBench: Counterfactual Visual Reasoning for Segmentation Hallucination Evaluation
Recent progress in vision-language segmentation has significantly advanced grounded visual understanding. However, these models often exhibit hallucinations by producing segmentation masks for objects not grounded in the image content or by incorrectly labeling irrelevant regions. Existing evaluation protocols for segmentation hallucination primarily focus on label or textual hallucinations without manipulating the visual context, limiting their capacity to diagnose critical failures. In respon…

Biden's record on covid
Saw a comment along the lines of: "seems unfair to criticise Biden's record on covid, while the situation now under Trump is so much worse".
But I don't think of them as separate. Biden's government _contributed_ to how covid stands under Trump.
If Biden's lot had taken the opportunity to educate people (at least the ones open to considering science findings) that
- it's airborne like smoke
- an empty room can hold infectious virus
- air filters, UV and fresh air reduce the levels of it
- masks work better the better they fit
- you can be infectious without/before symptoms
- you're fairly likely still to be infectious for 10 days, a few people longer
- current vaccines don't stop you catching it or transmitting it
- it can mess with your immune system so you're more likely to catch other things
- vaccinated people can still get Long Covid
- it's not "mild", it's just that the damage is quiet
then even if they hadn't done anything more to address the problem, people would be in a far better position to deploy their own common sense.
And unlike funding or laws, that investment in _knowledge_ is something it would be difficult for Trump's lot to roll back.
But Biden & co chose instead to play down the risks, and explicitly or implicitly mislead people (e.g. the 5-day quarantine, which contradicts the real infectious period).
So, yes it's worse now, but they _contributed_ to how it is now. They chose to encourage misapprehensions and confusion, and the effects of that choice are still playing out now.
Not letting them off the hook on the grounds of being comparatively "less bad", when they themselves laid some of the foundations of the current state of play.
#covid #Biden #USPol #CovidIsntOver